


as we were, no longer, not be at all

by 100demons



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-09-30
Packaged: 2018-02-19 08:50:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2382329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/100demons/pseuds/100demons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some days, Sam shakes his shoes upside down before he puts them on, feeling imaginary scorpions scrape against the tips of his fingers and the aching grit of desert sand seared into the backs of his eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as we were, no longer, not be at all

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TigerLily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerLily/gifts).



“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

 _The Year of Magical Thinking_  
Joan Didion

 

* * *

 

 

Some days, Sam shakes his shoes upside down before he puts them on, feeling imaginary scorpions scrape against the tips of his fingers and the aching grit of desert sand seared into the backs of his eyes.

Those are the days he pours a little Scotch in his coffee and toasts the wilting vase of daisies he bought for Riley’s grave and never quite got around to actually laying it against his Arlington headstone. The dried up petals scattered on his windowsills look like tiny little raisins, all shriveled up and crumpled in on themselves. He thinks about cleaning it up sometimes, but mostly he comes up with excuses he’ll give his mother whenever she comes around to sigh disparagingly at the state of his fridge.

“It’s contemporary art,” he says and his mother gives him a look, hand cocked against her hip and wielding a spatula like he’s seen soldiers hold knives.

“It’s supposed to symbolize the transience of life, you know.”

“It symbolizes your lazy ass,” she says, taking none of his half-assed shit, and whips up a pile of flapjacks enough to feed an army.

“My therapist says it’s good for me to make art,” Sam says, feeling only a little guilty at using his V.A. shrink to get out of a scolding.

“Well,” his mother says and there are a thousand things flitting across the broad planes of her face. “Well, she says again and then slides over a plate of food on the table. “You gonna eat this or not?”

Sam eats it and thinks about how much Riley fucking hated breakfast food. (“Man, you know what I really hate?” Riley said once, wiping down his wings with a rag, two cigarettes stuffed in his mouth like smoking walrus tusks.

“The Yankees,” Sam said, turning the page of a dogeared Grisham novel he borrowed from Stanton. There was a dinky stain covering the pages of the first couple of chapters that Sam devoutly hoped was just water and not spunk.

“Fuck the Yankees,” Riley said reflexively, ash trailing away from his lips like an extended comma. “God, I hate those fuckers.”

“Uh huh.”

“But not just the Yankees. You know what else I hate? Breakfast for dinner. What kind of idiots sit down and have freaking eggs and sausages for dinner? And pancakes. They’re just really floppy not tasty pieces of pita bread. I want some real food when I sit down for dinner, you know, like meat and beans and shit that makes my arteries clog up just by looking at it.”

“Bacon,” Sam reminded him. “And breakfast burritos, they’re delicious.”

“Except those two, yeah, I guess,” Riley said and spat a nub of a cigarette down onto the ground. The other one was still clenched in his teeth. “But everything else can go burn in hell.”

“Aw shit, you just never had real breakfast growing up,” Sam said. “Wait til you have my Mom’s cooking. No one makes meaner flapjacks.”)

Sam finishes his food, picks his worn running shoes up from the ground, gives them a quick shake and kisses his mother on the cheek. “I’m gonna go out for some air,” he says. “Please don’t rearrange my DVDs like you did last time, I still can’t find half my Bruce Lee movies.”

“That’s because they were scattered all over your living room floor,” she informs him. “I was just picking them up.”

“Alright,” he says, because he knows a lost argument when he sees one. He ducks outside into the waiting DC heat, sticky and wet and heavy and nothing like the dry, cutting desert heat. There’s enough water in the air to coat the insides of his lungs, making each breath feel like a herculean effort. It makes the running harder and Sam likes it that way, the mindless burn that chases away any feeling but the slap of hot asphalt against his feet. 

 

* * *

 

“How are you?” Alan asks, sitting back in his chair, hands folded in his lap. Valleys of loose skin wrinkle up against the edges of his knobbly knuckles, pale blue veins spidering across his thin wrists.

Sam settles down in his rickety wooden chair, unfolding his long legs, and bitches about the heat.

“The AC’s out,” Alan nods, looking perfectly at peace in his sweater vest and wire frame Urkel glasses. “I’m sure they’ll manage to get it fixed sometime soon.”

In the V.A. sometime soon means something like “maybe by the next Ice Age but not if we don’t have the required forms signed in triplicate,” so Sam resigns himself to a long, sweaty summer.

“How was the visit from your mother?”

“Good,” Sam says, and it’s a little surprising, to feel the tang of truth on his tongue. “She made me breakfast.”

“Hm,” Alan nods, and it’s not a shrink hm, but a conversational one, to keep things going. Sam doesn’t know how he feels about that, being so used to all this stuff it’s almost normal.

“She thinks I’m wasting away,” Sam shrugs. “You know how moms are. She got even worse after Alexys, she’s my sister, she had J.J. and I guess it brought back her mothering instinct.”

“Does she stop by often?”

“Every few weeks, I guess. She lives back up in New York and makes the drive down. Um, since I got back Stateside.”

“Did you think of him today?” Alan asks gently and he’s like a fucking bloodhound, sniffing out even the tiniest bit of discomfort Sam’s not even sure he’s feeling.

“Uh,” Sam says, fiddling with the fob of his keychain. “Riley is uh, he wasn’t a huge fan of breakfast food.”

“Did it upset you?”

“Did it make me feel weird?” Sam swallows. “Yeah. Yeah, a little I guess. I mean, I don’t know. It’s not like he just died. A lot of times, I don’t even think about him for hours, and then stuff just comes up. Riley comes up.”

“There’s no set timetable on the grieving process,” Alan says, quiet. “Some days are good, some days are not so good. Some days, remembering him will hurt more.” His dark eyes are kind.

Sam looks away, down at the worn brown carpeting.

“I’m twenty eight. Jump School plus EXO training, six, seven months. Then a year as partners. That’s it. But it feels like that year bleeds into everything else, until it’s like all twenty eight years have some little bit of Riley in them.” Sam licks his dry, chapped lips. “And all twenty eight years have some little bit of the war in them.”

 

* * *

 

Up in the air, there’s no extra noise, nothing but the sound of his heart and Riley’s raspy breath curled in his ear, smoke-rough and nasal from long summers spent eating hot dogs at Fenway and sailing stick boats down the Charles river.

“You know, back when I was a kid, I broke my arm when I threw myself off the monkey bars because I thought I could fly.”

“You were a dumb fucking kid,” Sam laughs and slices through the air effortlessly.

“Yeah?” Riley grins and the tip of his wing brushes against Sam’s hip. “Well, look where we are now. We’re flying, Sam.”


End file.
